


[Pod poem] Wordmasochist Challenge - a poem and a rant

by rhythmia



Category: No Fandom
Genre: Audio Format: MP3, Audio Format: Streaming, English pronunciation is a mess, Gen, Linguistics, Podfic, Podfic & Podficced Works, Podfic Length: 10-20 Minutes, Podfic Length: 20-30 Minutes, US West Coast accent, Wordmasochist Challenge, freetalk, podficcer notes and ranting at the end
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-04-22
Updated: 2020-04-22
Packaged: 2021-03-01 20:40:24
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,575
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/23783284
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rhythmia/pseuds/rhythmia
Summary: My rendition of the Wordmasochist Challenge, found here: https://primarybufferpanel.tumblr.com/post/86685591344/primarybufferpanel-blackestglassPoetry that showcases the linguistic hot mess that is English, a language that is 3 languages in a trenchcoat mugging other languages in a dark alley and rifling their pockets for spare words.
Comments: 2
Kudos: 9
Collections: Behind the Pod - Freetalk collection, The Chaos poem (podfic challenge)





	[Pod poem] Wordmasochist Challenge - a poem and a rant

**Author's Note:**

  * Inspired by [Wordmasochist challenge text](https://archiveofourown.org/external_works/610057) by Gerard Nolst Trenité. 



> Thank you to the Podficcer discord for egging me on <3 This version is lightly edited, though I haven't taken out all the mistakes, haha. Also stay tuned, there will be a collection going up and possibly a collaborative podfic version as well? :D

Ages ago, primarybufferpanel set out this challenge. https://primarybufferpanel.tumblr.com/post/86685591344/primarybufferpanel-blackestglass

Tonight, I answer the call. (and I'm dragging the podficcer discord along with me)

Download **the adapted version** mp3 [12:33 minutes, 8.62 MB] on [Mediafire](https://www.mediafire.com/file/a1rrtram49rwqvf/2020.04.21_wordmasochist_challenge_-_by_rhythmia.mp3/file) or download/stream at [Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1qY9qw-c34823sz2cSfRtq_k1J2qnS4az)

 **EDIT:** Also did a cold read of the [long version](http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html) as a live read for the good folks of the podfic discord, who also advised on the pronunciation of various place names in Great Britain, thanks y'all! Minimal editing, includes all the parts where I argue with the text, consult with listeners, and then argue more with the text.

 **Long version** [25:03 minutes wowza, 17.2 MB] found on [Mediafire](https://www.mediafire.com/file/dwzggu8u0ax93ge/2020.04.22_wordmasochist_challenge_long_version_live_read_-_by_rhythmia.mp3/file) or [Google Drive](https://drive.google.com/open?id=1BD7I5P7pADPdfKchA4V6MgLUd-stUFi2)

Below is the text/transcription of the image of the poetry found at the tumblr link. I've added stanzas for ease of reading and hints for pronunciation in the rhyming (not. that it always helped me lol)

**The wordmasochist challenge, as set by primarybufferpanel!**

The poem is an adaptation of [The Chaos](http://ncf.idallen.com/english.html) by Gerard Nolst Trenité, who despite his last name was actually Dutch, not French.

image description: a huge block of text

Header reads: If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world.

pause image description for podficcer comment! 

I will rant a lot about this header note and more at the end, since I did my undergraduate degree in sociolinguistics! 

Also note that I speak with a US accent coming out of Northern California. I'm a native speaker, even if TECHNICALLY it's my second language, since English became my dominant language from like age 3, and words that I don't usually rhyme I'm gonna use the variant to make the dang thing rhyme the way the writer clearly intended using their own accent, but i'm gonna yell about it at the end hehe

continue image description: after trying the verses, a Frenchman said he'd prefer six months of hard labor to reading six lines aloud. 

  


Here we go!

Dearest creature in creation,  
Study English pronunciation.  
I will teach you in my verse  
sounds like corpse, corps, horse, and worse.

I will keep you, Suzy, busy,  
Make your head with heat grow dizzy.  
Tear in eye, your dress will tear.  
So shall I! Oh hear my prayer.

Just compare heart, beard, and heard,  
Dies and diet, lord and word,  
Sword and sward, retain and Britain.  
(Mind the latter, how it's written.)

Now I surely will not plague you  
with such words as plaque and ague.  
But be careful how you speak:  
Say break and steak, but bleak and streak;

Cloven, oven, how and low,  
Script, receipt, show, poem, and toe.  
Hear me say, devoid of trickery,  
Daughter, laughter, and Terpsichore

Typhoid, measles, topsails, aisles,  
Exiles, similes, and reviles;  
scholar, vicar, and cigar,  
solar, mica, war and far;

one, anemone, Balmoral  
Kitchen, lichen, laundry, laurel;  
Gertrude, German, wind, and mind,  
Scene, Melpomene, mankind.

Billet does not rhyme with ballet,  
Bouquet, wallet, mallet, chalet.  
Blood and flood are not like food,  
Nor is mould like should and would.

Viscous, viscount, load and broad,  
Toward, to forward, to reward,  
And your pronunciation's OK  
When you correctly say croquet,

Rounded, wounded, grieve and sieve,  
Friend and fiend, alive and live.  
Ivy, privy, famous; clamour  
And enamour rhyme with hammer.

River, rival, tomb, bomb, comb,  
Doll and roll and some and home.  
Stranger does not rhyme with anger,  
Neither does devour with clangour.

Souls but foul, haunt but aunt,  
Font, front, wont, want, grand, and grant,  
Shoes, goes, does. Now first say finger,  
And then singer, ginger, linger,

Real, zeal, mauve, gauze, gouge and gauge,  
Marriage, foliage, mirage, and age.  
Query does not rhyme with very (except when it DOES!!!)  
Nor does fury sound like bury.

Dost, lost, post and doth, cloth, loth,  
Job, nob, bosom, transom, oath.  
Though the differences seem little,  
We say actual but victual.

Refer does not rhyme with deafer.  
Foeffer does, and zephyr, heifer.  
Mint, pint, senate and sedate;  
Dull, bull, and George ate late.

Scenic, Arabic, Pacific,  
Science, conscience, scientific.  
Liberty, library, heave and heaven,  
Rachel, ache, moustache, eleven.

We say hallowed, but allowed,  
People, leopard, towed, but vowed.  
Mark the differences, moreover,  
Between mover, cover, clover;

Leeches, breeches, wise, precise,  
Chalice, but police and lice;  
Camel, constable, unstable,  
Principle, disciple, label.

Petal, panel, and canal,  
Wait, surprise, plait, promise, pal.  
Worm and storm, chaise, chaos, chair,  
Senator, spectator, mayor.

Tour, but our and succour, four.  
Gas, alas, and Arkansas.  
Sea, idea, Korea, area,  
Psalm, Maria, but malaria.

Youth, south, southern, cleanse, and clean.  
Doctrine, turpentine, marine.  
Compare alien with Italian,  
Dandelion and battalion.

Sally with ally, yea, ye,  
Eye, I, ay, aye, whey, and key.  
Say aver, but ever, fever,  
Neither, leisure, skein, deceiver.

Heron, granary, canary.  
Crevice and device and aerie.  
Face, but preface, not efface.  
Phlegm, phlegmatic, ass, glass, bass. [podficcer note: the voice, not the fish]

Large, but target, gin, give, verging,  
Ought, out, joust and scour, scourging.  
Ear, but earn and wear and tear  
Do not rhyme with here but ere.

Seven is right, but so is even,  
Hyphen, roughen, nephew Stephen.  
Monkey, donkey, Turk and jerk,  
Ask, grasp, wasp, and cork and work.

Pronunciation (think of Psyche!)  
Is a paling stout and spikey?  
Won't it make you lose your wits,  
Writing groats and saying grits?

It's a dark abyss or tunnel:  
Strewn with stones, stowed, solace, gunwale,  
Islington and Isle of Wight,  
Housewife, verdict and indict.

Finally, what rhymes with enough,  
Though, through, plough, or dough, or cough?  
Hiccough has the sound of cup.  
My advice is to give up!!!

Transcription of my rant below:  
  
The end! Now follows the rant! Okay, so, first of all, I had my undergrad degree in sociolinguistics! Which is about how people use language, and the social implications of that, how different social groups use them, and how things are valued socially....

So that was my undergrad, and I'm a speech therapist now. So, that whole...aghhh [mocking voice] "If you can pronounce correctly every word in this poem, you will be speaking English better than 90% of the native English speakers in the world." [/end mocking voice] yeah that's this rant.

So first of all, one of the foundational ideas in sociolinguistics, and SHOuLD BE in speech therapy, is that all accents, dialects, and variations in pronunciation are all equal linguistically. Even if they're not...socially, cuz, humans gonna human, and languages and accents are a way that people... that people like, use that as a tool to oppress other people. Fabulous. Uh, yeah.

English - I kind of stole this, part of this metaphor from stuff going on on tumblr, but, basically, English is three languages in a trench coat, that goes around mugging other languages in dark alleys and rifling in their pockets for more words, and running off, and swallowing them whole and sort of pretending they were there the whole time (I mean, other languages do this too though! English is just really egregious about it and doesn't have an official body deciding like what gets to be part of the language, I'm looking at you, French and Spanish)

And there's so many DIFFERENT Englishes. Like, YES cultural hegemony, it's not just the US and England and Australia, there's like Indian English and Singaporean English and Nigerian English and and and... you know, like English is all over the place as a FUN legacy of colonialism.

So, which is how the mismatch between pronunciation and spelling is actually really really fascinating, since it's a clue to the history of how words maybe used to be pronounced, which is really fun.

So basically, rules for pronunciation totally get thrown out the door, when our words have roots in SO MANY different languages.

So, IN CONCLUSION! It sucks that due to English colonialism and US hegemony that English has ended up the common language of the world. Because, while it is one of the easiest languages to half-ass learn partway to get by, at the same time, it is one of the hardest to master, and this is before you get to like, all the idioms, and sayings, and, like nuances of which words fit in which situations, like the difference between, like a booty-call and a butt dial, that kind of thing.

So yeah! Uh, so basically the premise behind this whole thing, I deeply, deeply disagree with, but it was fun to do this, to play around with words. I...kind of cheated cuz I did look up a few words I wasn't sure about beforehand, and, um, put them in IPA, International Phonetic Alphabet, in my text to work off of. Not that it helped me, because I still messed up with, whatever the....frick...mauve is, I know that's a color. Probably. And dust and loth. But whatever.

Cool! Hope you had fun listening to the poem and the rant. And you can go to the post page and find me, rhythmia, on archiveofourown.org, and it'd be pretty cool of you, if you wanted to leave a comment, or a kudos, or an audio comment, you wanna record something and link it in response, it'd be cool! If you wanna do it yourself, that would also be fun! Do it and then link me! Yah~ Taa~ [/end transcription]

Hope you all had fun! Come say hi!

**Author's Note:**

> I exist on [tumblr!](rhythmelia.tumblr.com/) To be edited if I ever add a tumblr blog post to this. Come yell about things with me, here or there. :D


End file.
